"This is the culmination of many long term strategic trends - all
of which were pointing towards the answer that until we reach a point of less
disruptive change and greater stability which is still some years in the future
- that in today's changing enterprise market it is the rackmount SSD companies
(including cloud) and systems architecture and software which are the only
optimal scale in which to design, integrate, and sell SSD everywhere solutions
as a business brand."

"Violin and Pure were both tied
at #2 in this quarter. But Violin's revenue picture was somewhat different to
Pure's in this period. (Pure's revenue was 14x higher than Violin's.) Violin's
quarterly revenue in early 2016 was about half what it was in 2012 (the year
before going public). Given that Violin's product line uses proprietary
controllers some of the fascination with Violin is that it is still surviving."

Pure Storage
joined the top 3 companies in the list for the first time.

"This
is the best ever ranking for Pure Storage in the history of this series (which
was tracking enterprise flash array market leaders for years before Pure was
founded.) I think that part of the mood leading to this high degree of interest
in Pure was curiosity as to whether the (recently public) company's results
would show that there was a new type of flash based business miracle to be
revealed by a company which didn't have its own flash technology and had already
told investors in its IPO documents that its ratio of customers to employees was
close to an unsustainable 1 on 1."

Micron reached its
highest rank (so far) in the history of this series.

"this has
been a long journey for SanDisk and for the SSD industry as the tides of market
change have been washing away the previous best beauty spots and redefining the
SSD landscape with an impersonal power which resembles lunar forces."

"The SSD everywhere
ecosystem is a strange kind of creature which has emerged as sufficiently big in
scope to deserve its own (new dynasty) thinking as the only viable way forward
and indeed the endgame - instead of merely being a collaborative vehicle to
improve the ride for data safaris which were designed long ago with entirely
different raw technology components in mind."

"the final phase of
fattening the SSD vendor count (battle of the bulge) will occur because many of
the products needed to enable the transition to a more user-friendly and
competitive consolidated market will come from new companies and entirely new
product types which only exist today in embryonic forms."

"This quarter recorded Micron's
highest rank so far in the history of this series. Micron stood out for me in
2014 for not having acquired any significant SSD companies. Another thing which
stood out for me was that because Micron doesn't have the type of strong sticky
controller architecture and SSD software which would make it easy to lock-in
customers and bypass many of the SSD companies it supplies to - Micron is a less
threatening flash partner for many enterprise SSD companies to work with."

"New SSD based software will demolish
many limits you thought were set in concrete - such as the size of server memory
and the restrictions of how you can redeploy and migrate data which is siloed in
different legacy systems."

"Just
after the quarter ended - SanDisk announced an agreement to acquire SMART
Storage. In the 24 hours which followed that announcement - the search spike
for SMART in our readership temporarily shot it up to the #2 most searched SSD
company."

2 companies went straight from exiting stealth
mode into the list:- DensBits
and
Skyera.

Also
2 longer established companies - Kaminario and KingFast - made
their first appearances in this list.

I asked Fusion-io to reveal what
they were doing to implement DSP IP inside flash SSDs? Fusion declined to
answer. (2 years later Fusion-io lagged competitors in its support of 19nm
flash..)

I rhetorically asked - Can Violin sustain its lead in the
rackmount market? - because I said - It will get more difficult as the
rackmount SSD market itself
fragments
more clearly into different
types of products.

"Every single company in
the top 10 has its own proprietary SSD controller IP and architecture... We
haven't gotten to the stage where the color or the brand on the SSD box
determines how many get sold. Nevertheless some brands are now firmly associated
with particular concepts."

Texas Memory Systems announced the
RamSan-440 - a 600,000 IOPS 4U rackmount RAM SSD with 512GB capacity and latency
of less than 15 microseconds. A revolutionary advance was the use of internal
flash SSD backup and a feature called Instant-On I/O. That means multi terabyte
RAM SSDs start working after a power failure orders of magnitude faster than
earlier products which used HDD backup.

STEC's one time position as the oem with
the fastest (announced) flash SSDs for the enterprise server market was severely
dented by announcements of significantly faster flash SSD products from several
newcomers to this market segment including Fusion-io and Texas Memory Systems.

Today (July 2007) there are
over 55 active listed SSD oems. ...I expect the total number of SSD oems to go
north of 100 in 2008.

The new storage gold rush is chasing an
opportunity for storage systems companies that could eventually be worth 5 to 10
billion dollars a year. And this is a market in which the usual suspects - EMC,
IBM, HP are nowhere. So in theory anyone could end up dominating this market.

the companies which you absolutely have to look at
if you've got any new projects involving SSDs?

In 2007 I started publishing a new series - the Top SSD
Companies which has been seen by over 7 million readers and is now regarded by
many key people in the SSD industry (and their investors and biggest
customers) as one of the most useful
SSD articles
which influences their thinking.

In the very
1st edition (July
2007) I explained why I believed search volume based data would be the
best way to shortlist the future winners in the SSD market. I said...

The SSD market is going to grow from a small base of easy to follow
companies (just 11 in
1999)
into many hundreds of companies that few people - apart from
market specialists
- will have the time to analyze and follow.

SSDs will change
from being a niche topic to become the
most significant
business leveraging assets in the enterprise IT infrastructure - therefore
it would be useful to identify future leaders as early as possible.

Financial data is backwards looking, is available too late to
provide visibility in fast growing discontinuous markets, and is not available
for the significant companies in the market - which when I began this series
were nearly all privately owned.

It's the early adopters and the movers and shakers who make markets happen.

In the years leading up to the start of this new series - that had
been almost exclusively the readers of StorageSearch.com

And although
there are now thousands of web sites which cover the SSD market - our
readership still includes most of the significant people who will decide the
shape of the future SSD market including the people who start and manage the
most significant SSD companies and their biggest and most trend setting
customers.

Many of these arguments above are just as valid today.
And as the SSD market has grown bigger and the predictive power of the series
has been market proven - each new edition of the Top SSD Companies is
eagerly anticipated.

I'm a heavy user of the list myself - because it
reminds me what you think is important. And the real-time raw version is
sensitive enough to tell me about emails and news stories I should have looked
at but didn't.

...

...

SSD market history is long
and complicated.

The past analysis of trends didn't always fully
reveal strategic trends which help us to understand what's happening now.

This article splits SSD history into 4 "before and after"
event tipping points.

I was even more impressed
by a new (to me) business model which Tegile has been testing on selected
customers. I can see now why the early investors liked this company even though
it took me longer to get it...

The big market impact of
SSD dark matter - you can't see them and they aren't in the market size
reports which you just purchased recently. But you can't plan SSD investments or
strategies without taking them into account.